Friday, April 27, 2007

Sampa Music Who is your muse?. This is one of the most exciting features we have added to Sampa and it is called "My Muse". Did you ever stared a blank piece of paper waiting for some inspiration to come by so you could write a paper, a letter, an article, or, nowadays, a blog post? Your Muse just appeared to save you from a condition that affects millions of website owners known as BPS (Blank Page Syndrome). This is when you want to write something on your blog but don't know what to write about and your family and friends keep asking you why you haven't written anything lately. How this works? Just sign in to your Sampa site, and on the first column of the new Site Overview you'll find your Muse. By default it displays bestselling books and movies. One click on a book or movie and you can write a review of that. Did you like Borat? What about an Inconvenient Truth? Loved it? Hated it? You can also click on the "Configure My Muse" link to change what is listed there. Are you into wine books? Check that. Like Horror movies? Check that. On the next few months we will be adding a bunch of new categories to your muse. Enjoy it and let us know what other inspirations you want on your muse. By Marcelo Calbucci. [Sampa Blog] 6:23:52 PM

Ralf's E-mail In my Inbox Today.. Those spammers are getting more and more inventive. This is almost art. Or perhaps it is. [The Cartoonist] 5:52:25 PM

'Music in a Word' Musical Language. I heard a re-broadcast of the show Radio Lab on Musical Language today; interesting material for anyone looking at the intersection of (duh) music and language. The show included segments on meaningful commonalities in tone used by parents to infants across (apparently) all language, the initial furor then rapid acclimation for Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, and Diana Deutsch's research propensity towards perfect pitch in speakers of tonal languages: For those of us who have trouble staying in tune when we sing, Deutsch has some exciting news. The problem might not be your ears, but your language. She tells us about tone languages, such as Mandarin and Vietnamese, which rely on pitch to convey the meaning of a word. Turns out speakers of tone languages are exponentially more inclined to have absolute (AKA 'perfect') pitch. And, nope, English isn't one of them. Radio Lab has recently become one of my favorite shows. In that genre of radio variety/magazine-type shows, it's structured sort of like This American Life, but substituting geekiness for hip. Other recent episodes include Space, Detective Stories, and Morality. [work/space] 5:43:10 PM